The Princeton Mind in the Modern World and the Common Sense of J. Gresham Machen

By Darryl G. Hart

Johns Hopkins University, History Department, Baltimore, Maryland 21218

In his appraisal of Schleiermacher’s response to “What is Christianity?” Charles Hodge wrote that every theology is in one sense a form of philosophy. “To understand any theological system we must understand the philosophy that underlies it and gives it its peculiar form.”[1] It is uncertain whether Hodge would have applied this statement to his own theology and that of his associates at Princeton for when reading the writings of the Princeton theologians it seems that they considered themselves objective and neutral. In other words, Hodge and his theological heirs gave the impression that they were free from philosophical bias. This alleged neutrality, however, resulted as much from Princeton’s philosophical tendencies as from any sort of self-delusion.

The philosophical commitments that gave the Princeton theology its “peculiar form” were the principles of Scottish Common Sense Realism.[2] Sydney Ahlstrom and others have shown that Princeton was not unique in its adherence to the philosophy of Common Sense.[3] The spell of Common Sense also lured Unitarians at Harvard and moderate Calvinists at Yale. Scottish Realism was the philosophy of Victorian America.

Princeton’s uniqueness stems, however, from its persistent use of Common Sense even after this philosophy had fallen from grace in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. J. Gresham Machen, who expired the last official gasp of the Princeton theology,[4] serves as a prime example of Princeton’s reliance upon Common Sense. As George Marsden and Grant Wacker have demonstrated, in his day Machen was a fossil from the middle of the nineteenth century.[5] At a time when historicism informed the presuppositions of academia, Machen constantly appealed to the dictates of Common Sense.

Most assessments of Princeton have viewed its allegiance to Common Sense as either incompatible with its commitment to Reformed theology or naive. According to Ahlstrom, the price Princeton paid for aligning itself so closely with Scottish Realism was that it lost its “Reformation bearings,” its Augustinian brand of piety suffered, and the belief that Christianity had a proclamation to declare lost its vitality. “Doctrine became less a living language of piety than a complex burden to be borne.”[6] Marsden has made the point that because of its Common Sense epistemology, Princeton failed to recognize how much both point of view and cultural conditioning taint all human perceptions.[7] In this sense, Princeton’s evidential apologetic was superficial because it thought it could prove the truth of Christianity without taking into account an individual’s presuppositions.

While some of this criticism is valid, it also fails to recognize the virtues of Princeton’s use of Common Sense. Machen graphically represents the positive elements of the Princeton mind. Surrounded by the relativism of historicism and confronted with the problems of the Common Sense epistemology,[8] Machen still looked to Scottish Realism for sustenance. One might go so far as to say that with the underpinnings of Common Sense, Machen was able to weather the storms of modern thought and offer an incisive critique of modern religion. This essay will focus on the influence of Scottish Realism on Princeton’s thought, not as a liability but as a vital component in the resilience of the Princeton mind. By tracing first Princeton’s conceptions of truth, theology as a science, and the Bible as fact back to its philosophical commitments, I will attempt to identify the positive elements in Princeton’s use of Common Sense, particularly in the thought of Machen.

On September 25, 1929, at the opening of Westminster Theological Seminary, Machen announced the loss of Princeton Seminary from the evangelical cause. Machen was not just trying to increase enrollment. He considered Princeton’s toleration of board members in sympathy with the Auburn Affirmation a “great calamity.” For Machen the reorganization of Princeton had caused its death. But in the same breath that Machen pronounced Princeton dead, he also declared the resurrection of old Princeton. “The noble tradition of Princeton Seminary is alive,” he averred. “Westminster Seminary will endeavor by God’s grace to continue that tradition unimpaired; it will endeavor…to maintain the same principles that the old Princeton maintained.”[9]

As this quotation from Machen reflects, resistance to change was a trademark of the Princeton theology. Charles Hodge expressed this concern succinctly when he said, “I am not afraid to say that a new idea never originated in this seminary.”[10] With this boast, Hodge articulated Princeton’s abhorrence of any sort of theological innovation that might obscure the truths of the Protestant Reformation. Francis L. Patton expanded on Hodge’s remark when he said that one of the distinctives of Princeton was that it had “no theological labels, no trademark.” Princeton simply taught Calvinism “without modification.” Princeton’s major task had been to resist obstinately “the modifications proposed elsewhere, being in their logical results subversive of Reformed faith…. Princeton’s boast, if she have reason to boast at all, is her unswerving fidelity to the Reformation.”[11]

Princeton’s orthodoxy expressed itself in the seminary’s commitment to the seventeenth-century scholasticism of Francis Turretin and the Westminster Confession of Faith. Turretin’s massive tome, Institutio theologicae elencticae, was the primary theological textbook at Princeton until the publication of Hodge’s Systematic Theology in 1872.[12] Princeton’s loyalty to the Westminster standards is manifested in the oath that was taken by every professor, one that restricted them from teaching or insinuating anything contrary to the Confession of Faith or the Catechisms.[13]

Princeton’s hesitancy to go beyond the orthodoxy of the seventeenth century stemmed from its conception of truth. Princeton was committed to the traditional Western view of truth as objective and invariable. Because the reformers of the sixteenth century had discovered theological truth and the Reformed scholastics had given the truth its fullest expression, there was no need to change.[14] Thus Princeton could by definition make no other contribution to the cause of orthodoxy other than a defense of the faith.

Given this apologetic posture, Princeton found Scottish Realism a natural ally for its efforts. Scottish Realism held truth in the same esteem as did Princeton.[15] According to John Witherspoon, who has been called the first real ambassador of the Scottish Philosophy,[16] truth is discovering things as they “really are in themselves,” and in their relations to each other.[17]

Witherspoon reflected the typical belief of Scottish Realism that it was possible to perceive the intelligible structures of the universe without any theoretical foundation. This view of truth was greatly reinforced by the British inductivism of Bacon and Newton. Inductivism guaranteed true knowledge methodologically; truth could be ascertained by the observation of real facts. Empiricism, however, the base on which inductivism rested, was being used in other systems to undermine rather than to support this understanding of objective truth. For example, David Hume questioned whether the idea imprinted on the mind by the senses corresponded to external objects; he thus reduced the certainty of scientific investigation to probability and ultimately to skepticism.[18] Hume’s skepticism provoked Thomas Reid, the archetypal Scottish philosopher,[19] to try to devise a firm foundation for inductive science and make truth secure.

Reid’s reply to the skepticism of Hume began with the epistemology of the real. To establish the reality of the external world, Reid argued for the validity of these first principles; that what men perceive with their senses really exists: that the mind perceives not merely ideas or appearances of things but the external objects themselves; that observation of the external world is the basis of all knowledge; that all men possess the capacities to organize the data received by experience.[20] These first principles affirmed the ability of the mind to perceive and know the external world immediately and truly; as a result, Reid shored up the sagging walls of inductivism by maintaining the antithesis of Hume.

For Reid and his retinue, the first principles of Scottish Realism were the basic beliefs on which all knowledge rested. They could not be proven, nor did they need to be because “no man in his wits calls them into question.”[21] It was sheer folly to doubt the mind’s ability to know the external world truly. By assuming these basic beliefs of knowledge, Reid reiterated the powers of inductive science. But because inductive science was the true method of philosophizing, the way for human understanding to gain factual knowledge of the real world, Reid was implicitly defending the idea of objective truth. The “real stake” in the Scottish Realist writings about the accuracy of human sense perception was not empiricism itself, but rather “the objective tangibility of the Newtonian world.”[22] In other words, the central issue between Reid and the skeptics was man’s ability to have true and certain knowledge. Without the solid foundation of Scottish Realist first principles, man was cut off from the inductive method and ultimately from all truth.

It is no wonder that Princeton so readily embraced Scottish Realism, because in the Princeton mind theology was a scientific discipline. There are two senses in which Princeton defined theology as a science. The first and more narrow sense pertains to the method of the theologian. Princeton fully adhered to the scientific inductive method as applied to the natural sciences. Hodge gave the inductive method the most comprehensive expression in his Systematic Theology. Recognizing the validity of Scottish Realist first principles, he described the first task of the theologian as the need to accept certain assumptions. He must assume that his sense perceptions and his “mental operations,” such as perceiving, comparing, combining, remembering, and inferring, are trustworthy. The theologian moreover must also rely on the certainty of those truths not learned from experience but which “are given in the constitution of our nature.”[23] Having done this, the theologian’s duty is to “ascertain, collect and combine all the facts” that God has revealed concerning himself and man’s relation to him. Finally, the theologian must structure his work according to the same rules “in the collection of facts, as govern the man of science.” This work must be done with “diligence and care,” and also it must be “comprehensive, and if possible, exhaustive.”[24] Once the facts have been ascertained, they must be put into a system. Just as the man of science knows not merely acts but also the laws that govern those acts, the theologian must exhibit the “internal relation to those facts, one to another, and each to all.”[25] This idea of theology as a science reinforced the Princeton conception of orthodoxy as objective truth.[26]

The other sense in which Princeton employed the term “science” follows directly from the first. In his article “Theology a Science,” B. B. Warfield made the “more fruitful distinction” of theology as knowledge. Theology is “the science of God,” and as such it has for its end the knowledge of God.[27] In this sense theology is as scientific as chemistry because it is aiming at true knowledge.[28] Because true knowledge required the proper method, the Christian theologian’s accuracy depended on how well he used the inductive method and examined the facts.

For Princeton the Bible contained the facts. In the Calvinist tradition of natural and supernatural revelation, the most direct and extensive communique from God to man was Scripture. It contained not only the natural knowledge of God as creator, but also the special knowledge of God as redeemer, revealing God’s salvific purposes for mankind. In Hodge’s words, the Scriptures contain “all the extant revelations” of God, which are designed to be “a rule of faith and practice” for the church. By affirming the completeness of God’s revelation in the Bible, Hodge did not mean to deny the real revelation of “God’s eternal power and Godhead” in nature. Even those truths are clearly made known in God’s written word.[29] Since the Bible contains completely God’s revelation, Scripture is to the theologian what nature is to the man of science. “It is his storehouse of facts.”[30] Scripture contains all the particulars of knowledge of God, and since theology is the science of God, there is no other source of knowledge available to the theologian. In this context, the Bible is factual and therefore scientific as the object to which the inductive method is applied.

But according to Princeton, the Bible presents facts, not just in the sense of bits of information or doctrines about God, but also as an account of God’s redemptive acts in history. In this context the Bible is factual and scientific because it “teaches certain things about which science has a right to speak.”[31] The Bible makes specific claims in the sphere of history. Thus Scripture contains factual information about God and history. It may not be empirically possible to test the assertions about God, but the historical accounts are matters of fact and subject to scientific verification.[32] In this sense the Bible is as scientific and true as the textbook on the history of the American revolution.

Embellished by the storehouse of facts in Scripture and the theological method of inductivism, Christianity’s claims to truth made it an apologetic religion, capable of reasonable defense.[33] Taking full advantage of Princeton’s accommodation of science, Warfield wrote, “It is the distinction of Christianity that it has come into the world clothed with the mission to reason its way to its dominion.”[34] Christianity’s appeal meant that apologetical theology was the most important of all the theological disciplines at Princeton. The reason for the prominence was obvious. It has as much to do with the nature of truth as with the way man knows truth. The work of the exegete, the historian, and the systematist hangs in the balance until, when their labors are finished, they “wipe their steaming brows” and decide whether they have been studying “realities” or only “fancies.”[35] For Christianity to be true it must deal with facts. Thus the task of apologetics is to establish the existence of God, the capacity of the human mind to know him, and the accessibility of knowledge concerning him.[36] The work done by the apologist gives theology scientific respectability because all sciences are involved in the reality of the subject matter, the ability of the mind to perceive the subject matter, and the existence of a medium of communication between the subject matter and the percipient and the understanding mind.[37]

During Machen’s lifetime, however, the growing forces of scientific positivism, historicism, and higher criticism had thrown the scientific nature of theology into disrepute. What Washington Gladden had described in the 1890s as “a going in the tops of trees,”[38] had reached the status of a tropical storm by the 1920s. At the leading seminaries or divinity schools most of the theologians questioned the historical accuracy of Scripture, thereby undermining Christianity’s claim to objective truth. The storehouse of facts for the theologian was no longer factual. Particularly the claims of evolution and the higher criticism forced many theologians, who were accustomed to the accommodation of theology to science,[39] to abandon some of the incredible claims of Scripture.[40] This “liberal” response to the new learning, however, did not intend to abandon the truth or authority of Scripture. Instead, liberalism made the distinction between religious and scientific truth, insisting that the Bible was still true in spiritual matters. Thus Christianity could still be true even though Scripture might be scientifically false.

Machen would have nothing to do with the liberal proposal for peace with science because this abandonment of the intellect in matters of religion would not satisfy the rigorous demands of faith. For Princeton, faith was a highly rational affair. Faith in the irrational is impossible. Moreover because faith is the belief that something is true, an individual cannot have faith in something that the mind sees to be false. Consequently, knowledge is essential to faith, for truth must be known in order to be believed. Faith then is limited by knowledge because “we can believe only what we know, i.e., what we intelligently apprehend.” As a result, knowledge is the measure of faith; what lies beyond knowledge escapes faith.[41] In complete harmony with this condensed version of Hodge’s discussion of knowledge and faith, Machen declared that faith involves the acceptance of a proposition. “It is impossible…to have faith in a person without accepting with the mind the facts about the person.”[42] Machen’s emphasis upon the intellectual aspect of faith followed necessarily from the Princeton view of truth. That liberalism could have faith in something that it acknowledged to be false was truly beyond belief.

Machen also rejected liberalism’s effort to save the truth of Christianity because the sort of anti-intellectualism that equally accepted the truth of all creeds would ultimately lead to skepticism.[43] The way to avoid the skepticism of liberalism for Machen was simply a “matter of common sense.”[44] Just as the founders of Princeton had employed the Common Sense philosophy to counter the skepticism of Paine and Hume, Machen repeatedly appealed to axioms of Common Sense to defend the truth of Christianity.

As a representative of the Princeton mind, Machen demonstrated the importance of three principles of Common Sense Realism for his apologetic efforts. The first was the principle of universality: the basic beliefs of the Common Sense epistemology were held by all men in every age. According to Reid, these first principles were confirmed by “the universal consent of mankind,” not by philosophers only but also by “the rude and unlearned vulgar.”[45] The second axiom involved the function and nature of human language. Reid argued that language could truthfully communicate the real world. Language was the “express image and picture” of human thought because to conceive the meaning of a word and the object that it signifies was the “same” process.

In this way the meaning of the word was the object conceived.[46] This one-to-one correspondence between the word and the object it signifies implied that a description of the actual world was as reliable as the “perception of a fact,” as long as it was accurately described.[47] The third Common Sense principle dealt with man’s ability to remember and know the past. Knowledge of the past posed a problem for the empiricist if knowledge was only received through the senses. Reid’s solution involved the universal ability of all men to remember the past, and to distinguish the object or event remembered from the remembrance of it. In other words, when man remembers Rome, he does not remember an idea of Rome but Rome itself.[48] Thus past events are communicated by testimonies based on memory, and the knowledge gained through these testimonies is factual because memory is the remembrance of the thing itself.

Equipped with these Common Sense maxims, Machen unleashed an insightful critique of liberalism while defending the truth of Christianity. The most important component of Machen’s arguments was the Bible. Because Scripture was the only source for knowledge of God, Christianity’s claims to truth depended on the accuracy of the Bible. Apart from this, the truth of the Bible could not be autonomous from science, because Scripture was scientific in so far as it told the truth about the events of first century Palestine.

But before Machen could defend the historicity of the Bible, the modern presuppositions of liberalism required refutation.[49] At this point the Scottish Realist notions of the universality of the Common Sense epistemology and ability of language to communicate facts proved to be quite useful. William Newton Clarke articulated the historicist presuppositions of the modern mind in Sixty Years with the Bible. According to Clarke it was very difficult for modern readers to understand ancient texts. “The historical setting can never be perfectly reproduced in the reader’s mind.” For Clarke it was even more difficult to understand another mind, especially “when the other speaks out of another age and training.”[50] Machen maintained, however, contrary to Clarke, that the way men gain knowledge is essentially the same everywhere and at all times. Machen postulated that if every generation has its own thought forms and cannot use the thought forms of another generation, “then books produced in past generations ought to be pure gibberish to us.”[51] For Machen, the consistent use of historicist presuppositions implied that the meaning of the words of Aristotle, for instance, “began to wobble and has been wobbling for twenty-two centuries.”[52] Such an idea was ridiculous to Machen; Aristotle’s book was “just as limpidly clear and logical” as it had ever been.[53] The reason for Aristotle’s clarity was a common intellectual ground, a “gold standard,” which enables all men of all times and places to understand each other perfectly well. Thus Machen did not believe in the separate existence of an Oriental, Occidental, ancient, medieval, or modern mind. There may be difficulty in understanding the mental processes of different minds, he conceded, “but the very fact that we can both detect that difficulty affords hope that the difficulty may be overcome,” because recognition of this difficulty “shows that there is a common intellectual ground on which we can stand.”[54]

Machen’s use of the grammatico-historical method of exegesis follows from the Common Sense confidence in language. Far from Harry E. Fosdick’s view of language, which interpreted Scripture as the “changing categories” of “abiding experiences,”[55] Machen interpreted the language of biblical authors as actually expressing what the writers saw or experienced. Maintaining the harmony of science and orthodoxy, Machen termed this method the “scientific historical method.” It only required that the biblical writers should be allowed to speak for themselves rather than that the student of the Bible use exegesis as a platform for what he would like to say or what he wished the authors would have said.[56] If Luke wrote that Christ was born of a virgin, he was not expressing a spiritual truth in a mythical category; rather, he intended exactly what he wrote. Machen went to great lengths to show this in The Virgin Birth of Christ, weighing all objections and explanations of modern criticism at that time.[57] Machen believed that what Luke intended by his account of the virgin birth was a description of scientific fact. Thus if Luke wrote this knowing that it never happened, his report would be a lie. This either-or method of interpretation did not allow the critic to twist the statements of Scripture in order to make them acceptable and authoritative to a mind predisposed not to believe such a claim. The critic cannot substitute his interpretation for the intention of the author in an effort to cover up what he perceives to be blatant scientific discrepancies in Scripture. If he does, the critic is not being fair to the author, nor is he practicing good interpretation. For Machen the grammatico-historical method ensured fair play and would not allow any hedging on the question of the truth of Scripture.

Machen combined this Scottish Realist view of language and the belief in the universality of mankind with the Common Sense conception of memory to defend the Bible as a collection of first century testimonies about Christ. That the biblical writers trusted their memories along with the memories of other eyewitnesses was obvious. For Machen, Luke was a good example because he had been in contact with Christ’s brother, James, and with many other members of the primitive Jerusalem church. Luke gives evidence also of his presence in Palestine between AD 58 and 60. Obviously Luke had the fullest opportunity for acquainting himself with the occurrences described in his written works: the conversion of Paul, the events of the life of Christ, and the beginnings of the primitive church.[58] For Machen, the gospel narratives were trustworthy and a firm foundation upon which to base faith. The contemporary reader should be no less compelled than Paul, who based his conviction of the truth of Christianity on the accounts of the original apostles,[59] to believe the testimonies contained in the NT. Because courts of law would be unable to function without assuming the validity of human testimony,[60] the readers of the Bible must only imagine themselves as members of a jury while the biblical writers come forward to the witness stand. Using this imagery of the court, Machen vouched for the “self-evidencing quality” of the witnesses. “Personal testimony is a very subtle thing; when you face a witness on the witness stand the credence which you give his testimony is dependent…on a subtle impresion.” Machen encouraged the jury to read one of the Gospel narratives through from beginning to end with the speed usually applied to the morning paper. The impression that would be made on the mind is that the witness is describing events which really happened, and that the Gospels are not full of fables or fancies but rather are testimonies to the truth about Christ the Savior and his work on earth to redeem mankind.[61] Related to Machen’s concern for the truth of Scripture is his defense of the truth of creeds or confessions. Machen’s reasoning at this point, like that of his predecessors, is again dependent on Common Sense principles about the power of language to communicate objective truth and about the proper method of interpretation. Hodge foreshadowed Machen’s arguments in his review of Edwards A. Park’s sermon, “The Theology of the Feelings and that of the Intellect.” Park’s intention in the sermon was one of reconciliation; his purpose was to show that all creeds “which are allowable” can be reconciled with each other.[62] The allowable creeds as Hodge understood Park were “the two great antagonistic” systems of Calvinism and Arminianism.[63] Park’s method of performing this “good service” was to admit the truth of both systems by distinguishing two separate theologies, one of the intellect and one of the feelings, which may be made to mean precisely the same thing. In other words, these two systems are merely two forms of the same theology; the one “precise” and designed to engage the intellect, and the other “vague and intense” and adapted to move the feelings.[64] Hodge enumerated many objections to Park’s sermon, but his main objection focused on the question of truth and the capacity of language to communicate true thought. “The question is not, which of the antagonistic systems of theology described above is true…. The question is whether there is any correct theory of interpretation by which the two systems can be harmonized.”[65] In Hodge’s mind it was inconceivable that two systems that contradicted each other at so many points could be declared to be identical in meaning. It was the equivalent of destroying the meaning of church history; in effect it reduced all the great doctrinal debates to mere arguments over words, as if the parties, whether Augustinians or Pelagians, Thomists or Scotists, were essentially in perfect agreement.[66] Hodge’s answer to Park was, “If there be any power in language to express thought, if human speech be anything more than an instrument of deception, then these systems of doctrine are distinct and irreconcilable.”[67]

In Christianity and Liberalism Machen tried to show, as Hodge had done with Park, that two antagonistic systems were distinct and irreconcilable, or in Machen’s own words, that liberalism was un-Christian.[68] One of the objections that Machen anticipated and answered sounds much like the reconciliatory efforts of Park. The objection states that the teachings of liberalism “might be as far removed as possible from the teachings of historic Christianity, and yet the two might be at bottom the same.”[69] As this statement suggests, however, the range of creeds allowable for reconciliation had become so broad that Machen was faced with a new creed from which to distinguish orthodoxy. The new creed of liberalism had lost its power to communicate thought in that even though the words were the same, the meaning was entirely different. For instance, liberals affirmed the fatherhood of God and because of this considered themselves within the fold of Christianity.[70] But for Machen the doctrine of the universal fatherhood of God had no part in Christ’s teaching or historic Christianity, and liberalism’s use of Christian terminology, with its historic connotations, was outright “dishonesty” when the religious teacher, aware of his radicalism, was “unwilling to relinquish his place in the hallowed atmosphere of the Church by speaking his whole mind.”[71] Even though the creeds of Park and liberalism differed and the debate had shifted from a defense of orthodoxy to a defense of Christian theism itself, Hodge’s and Machen’s arguments were in essence the same; whether different words and their corresponding thoughts were irreconcilable or the same in their meanings.

In Machen’s opinion, however, liberalism played this juggling act not only with the meanings of words, but also with the truth or intellectual disciplines. He saw that the attempt to reconcile the truth of religion with the truth of science was a glaring form of skepticism. By accepting the truth of science in the sphere of religion, which were blatantly opposed at some points, liberalism was engaged in the “blight of pragmatism.”[72] According to Machen, pragmatism maintained the position that two contradictory statements may be equally good; consequently there is no possibility of a permanent and universal truth.[73] This pragmatic solution to the apparent contradictions of religion and science was actually “bottomless skepticism” because of the Princeton conception of truth. “We do not see how two statements can be equally ‘sound’ and not equally ‘true.’“[74] Religion is as “scientific” as science because each is equally concerned with truth. If science could show that these claims of Christianity in the sphere of history were false, then the Christian religion should be abandoned.[75]

It was just at this point, however, the sphere of history, that Machen showed that the liberal reconciliation of science and religion would not work. The traditional teaching of Christianity was rooted in historical facts. The most notable fact was the resurrection of Christ. Consequently, the discipline that could “establish” this fact was, as Machen called it, “historical science.” Historical science can confirm this event just as it does any other aspect of history, by examining whether the books or testimonies which document the event are accurate, because this involves a thorough examination of the biblical narratives, something which engaged much of Machen’s intellectual enterprises.[76] The truth of the Bible, however, was not the primary concern at this point of Machen’s argument. Just as Hodge had opposed Park over the reconcilability of the antagonistic systems of Calvinism and Arminianism, Machen opposed liberalism because it ignored the contradictory claims of science and religion in the sphere of history. Because Christianity taught the resurrection as an historic fact, “The Bible then…most emphatically does teach science; and the separation between science and religion breaks down.”[77]

The compatibility of religion and science was important also for Machen because his definition of the gospel and the object of faith turned directly on the findings of science, especially historical science. According to Machen, the interdependence of doctrine and history was undeniable. As he was so fond of pointing out, “‘Christ died’—that is history; ‘Christ died for sins’—that is doctrine.”[78] The Christian message to the world, therefore, is not the moral platitudes of liberalism. Rather, the gospel is what the term “gospel” means, good news.[79] It is the narration of an event that took place in the first century. But it is also more than merely just a relating of facts. The gospel as presented in Scripture also contains the meaning of the facts, the authoritative interpretation.[80] Thus there was no denying just the facts or just doctrine; both are so closely bound that to deny one necessitates the denial of the other. The bearing that the web of history and doctrine has on faith is that one cannot merely believe in the doctrinal statements of Christianity without believing those statements are historically based, or true. Because faith, in the Princeton sense, is based on the true knowledge of its object, the Christian’s faith in the gospel depends on the truth of the historical claims of “the good news.” For Machen this was not a hindrance, rather the facts of Christianity were the assurance that his faith was in something that was universally and permanently true.[81]

Because Machen maintained the truth of Christianity and the compatibility of religion and science, he was prone to feel much more at home with scientists than with liberals, even though the scientists might be avowed atheists because of their discoveries in the laboratory. Machen’s relative comfort with science was due to his idea of truth. At the point of truth, Machen considered himself very much like a scientist because he based his faith on facts. In this way Machen represented well the Princeton accommodation of science. While discussing the pragmatist theologian’s low view of truth as relative and in flux, Machen admitted that the scientist does often change his hypotheses, but he maintained that theories are not modified because the scientist thinks that truth is relative and subjective. Rather this change of opinion is due to “a better explanation of the facts.” Machen’s point was that new hypotheses, like the old, at least are intended to be permanently correct. “Science, in other words, though it may not in any generation attain truth, is at any rate aiming at truth.”[82] Thus, Machen was scientific because he maintained the ideal of absolute truth based on all the facts.[83]

Machen’s accommodation of science is an interesting point at which to appraise his reliance upon the Common Sense philosophy. His conception of theology as a science carried on the traditional Princeton concern for truth, and it illustrates the importance of Scottish Realism for Princeton’s allegiance to truth. In “Religion and Science in American Philosophy,” James Ward Smith writes of two types of accommodation of science. The first is the accommodation of scientific content. Liberalism exemplified this when it made the spheres of religion and science autonomous because evolution and many of the naturalist presuppositions associated with science contradicted the claims of Christianity. Liberalism accepted these conclusions of science and mapped out for itself another area for work, independent of the findings of science. The other sort of accommodation of which Smith writes was illustrated by Machen in the quotation above. This is the accommodation of method.[84] Machen aligned himself completely with the inductive method of deriving conclusions from a careful examination of facts. For Machen this was the only way to obtain permanent and objective truth.

As others have shown, the inductive method of Bacon, to which Machen adhered, was the cause for which Scottish Realism stood.[85] Reid’s work was largely designed to rescue Bacon’s method from Hume’s skepticism. Machen’s allegiance to inductivism, even in the twentieth century when much of the evidence appeared to contradict Christianity, followed from his acceptance of Scottish Realist principles. Probably the greatest principle that gave Machen sustenance was the Common Sense principle of truth as objective and absolute. Although not explicitly stated in Reid’s first principles, it is implied by his assumptions of the mind’s ability to know reality truly through the senses, and of the universality of the way man receives knowledge. It is further implied in his endorsement of the inductive method. With this conception of truth, buttressed by Common Sense axioms of knowledge, Machen was “obliged to keep…to the high, rough intellectualistic road of a sound epistemology.”[86]

As mentioned at the outset, some have questioned how sound Machen’s epistemology really was. George Marsden, with whose balanced remarks it is difficult to argue, has applied Smith’s thesis in “Religion and Science in American Philosophy” to nineteenth-century American apologists and found what Smith calls a superficial accommodation of science.[87] Smith calls accommodation superficial when it merely adds the corpus of science to religious beliefs without taking seriously the first principles of modern science. As examples, Smith cites the Puritan’s accommodation of Newtonian science and liberalism’s accommodation of Darwinism.[88] Marsden believes that nineteenth-century evidentialist apologists were guilty of a superficial accommodation of method when they underestimated how much “basic first beliefs and commitments can pervade the rest of one’s intellectual activity.”[89] Machen, who is very much a part of the evidentialist tradition at Princeton, falls under the same criticism. According to Marsden, Machen’s epistemology is deficient because of his devaluation of subjective aspects in knowing religious truth.[90] Although he nuances his remarks enough to say that Machen’s epistemology outstripped that of most of his contemporaries, Marsden still suggests that a “presuppositionalist approach to truth,” one that takes into account the subjective elements of knowing, would have more room in it for differences in opinion and perspective.[91] A presuppositional approach to truth would also take into account better the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit, enabling men to understand the truths of the gospel.[92]

Interestingly enough, a contemporary of Machen leveled a similar criticism against him. Intrigued by the claims of modernism, W. O. Carver criticized Machen for failing to deal adequately with the subjective elements of religious knowledge or faith. In his review of Christianity and Liberalism, Carver suggested that in its emphasis on doctrine Machen’s “interpretation” of Christianity was “far too external and too dependent on formal logic.” Carver wondered where Machen’s recognition of the inner workings of the Holy Spirit had gone and surmised that Machen had not so much as heard that there is a Holy Spirit.[93] In Carver’s opinion, the advice needed by the ones struggling with the claims of modernity was not the inflammatory arguments of Machen, but rather the “‘doctrine’ of the Holy Spirit, who is our ‘Comforter’, the living presence of Christ in the life of the church as it brings this Christ into the life of the world.”[94]

The appeal of the Holy Spirit in the experience of the believer was what Carver found so attractive in the modernism of Fosdick. Even though he was critical of Fosdick on many points, Carver believed that Fosdick’s use of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit as the agent of regeneration in the concept of “Abiding Experiences and Changing Categories,” would be a “turning point to faith and peace for many a troubled soul.”[95]

But Machen, always wary of the use of Christian terminology as a smoke-screen for doctrinal impurity, would not cater to the alleged needs of the modern mind. For Machen, the liberal appeal to religious experience under the guise of the testimony of the Holy Spirit was really the abandonment of objective truth in the sphere of religion.[96] Even Clarke believed that the appeal to the subjective, spiritual discernment of the believer would yield an objective standard for determining the truth of the Bible,[97] but he still asserted that Christianity had its power in spirit and life. “It cannot be formulated” because the “spiritual glory” of the religious experience as a criterion for truth was its lack of precision and rigidity.[98] Contrary to this liberal impulse toward “life” away from doctrine, Machen insisted that what the age needed was not more spirituality in the modern sense of the word but rather more precision and clarity, in other words, more doctrine.

Given the task of trying to distinguish orthodox Christianity from liberalism, it is no wonder that Machen overemphasized doctrine and the intellectual elements of faith. But to grant that Machen allowed little room for the inner workings of the Holy Spirit is perhaps too great a concession. True to his conception of theology as a science, Machen often discussed dispositions and presuppositions in scientific terminology. Ignorance of “the fact of sin” was what kept men from being “truly scientific” in their evaluation of the claims of Christianity. This means that to see the truth of anything one must examine all the facts. But recognition of the fact of sin is not a matter of empirical observation.[99] Rather it only comes through the regenerating work of the Spirit of God for only through the Holy Spirit’s conviction of any sin may the evidence for Christianity be convincing. Machen admitted that without the conviction of sin the evidence for the resurrection would be insufficient because of “the enormous weight of presumption” not to accept a miracle. “It is impossible to prove first that Christianity is true, and then proceed on the basis of its truth to become conscious of one’s sin; for the fact of sin is itself one of the chief foundations upon which the proof is based.”[100] Recognition of the fact of sin then was really a predisposition to believe the miraculous, redemptive acts of God in history because “The gospel cannot be understood unless its presuppositions,” the Christian view of God and man, “are accepted.”[101] Thus only a person under the influence of the Holy Spirit can “believe in the resurrection of Christ and…accept the claims of Christianity.”[102]

Machen’s recognition of the necessity of the work of the Holy Spirit for accepting Christianity as true should not be viewed as evidence that he was actually a presuppositionalist. In the passage cited above, Machen still talks about the objectivity of a “clear mind” accepting the truth of Christianity no matter what one’s “personal attitude” might be.[103] Paying deference to the teaching of Warfield, Machen affirmed that “The old order of apologetics is correct first there is God; second it is likely that He should reveal Himself; third, He has actually revealed Himself in Christ.”[104] These statements must be balanced, however, with his discussion of the fact of sin and presuppositions. Machen did not think that he could argue a person into the kingdom. He did recognize the subjective and in this sense was not naive or overly optimistic about the powers of apologetics.

Even though Machen insisted upon the temporal priority of the work of the Holy Spirit in faith, he spent most of his time defending the logical truth of Christianity. A fundamental distinction in Machen’s thought is the logical versus the temporal order of faith.[105] This distinction is important for understanding Machen’s apologetics and the Princeton tradition that he represented. In the temporal order of faith Machen conceded that the believer’s experience of regeneration by the Holy Spirit is fundamental. In this sense Christianity is based upon the experience of new birth. But Machen was quick to add that “what the Holy Spirit does in the new birth is not to make a man a Christian regardless of the evidence, but on the contrary to clear away the mists from his eyes and enable him to attend to the evidence.”[106] The new birth is not devoid of content. Faith involves assent to the truth of the gospel. In this sense doctrine comes logically before Christian experience. This logical priority of doctrine and the intellect is rooted in the Princeton conception of faith and knowledge; it is impossible to have faith in something that is known to be false. As William B. Green summarized, “while we often believe without logic, could we continue to believe against logic?”[107]

In this context, Machen’s defense of the intellectual aspects of faith does not seem to be a defect in his Calvinistic conceptions of sin and grace. Instead, Machen’s arguments preserve fundamental insights for a biblically based faith.[108] As the apostle Paul wrote, “If Christ be not risen…your faith is also in vain” (1 Cor 15:14). While Machen would have admitted that the acceptance of Christ’s resurrection depends on the conviction of sin, with Paul he would have also insisted upon the consequences if the resurrection were denied—”If the Bible were false, your faith would go.” The consequences of denying the truth of Christianity are a major factor in Machen’s arguments.[109] Representing well the forcefulness of the Princeton apologetic, Machen required that the question “Is Christianity true?” be addressed; the issue could not be sidestepped with the qualification that Christianity is religiously true. For Machen the real issue was not what argument should be used to prove the truth of Christianity but whether indeed the gospel were fact or fancy. According to Machen, the historic position of Christianity was rooted in the historical fact of Christ’s death and resurrection. To admit this was only a matter of common honesty and common sense. Even though Christianity was more than history (“we must know Christianity in our inner lives”), it was still founded on the proclamation of an event that occurred in first-century Palestine.[110]

Machen’s reliance upon the principles of Common Sense Realism enabled him to adhere confidently to the historic position of Christianity and defend the historical claims of Scripture. Certainly in the context of liberalism, at a time when Christianity had lost its “cosmic sense” and was no more than a life well led,[111] Hodge would have called Machen’s stand for orthodoxy the rock of Gibraltar in the midst of an ever-flowing stream of religious ideas. Consequently Machen’s use of Common Sense should not be maligned. Even though this philosophical system may have boded ill for nineteenth-century apologists it must also be credited with giving Machen sustenance. Indeed Machen’s common sense allowed him to aver the old Princeton refrain of a “clean choice between Christian orthodoxy or no Christianity at all.”[112]

Notes

1. Charles Hodge, “What is Christianity?” Princeton Review 32 (1860) 121.
2. See Theodore D. Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1977); Herbert Hovenkamp, Science and Religion in America 1800–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1978); and John C. Vander Stelt, Philosophy and Scripture: A Study in Old Princeton and Westminster Theology (Marlton, NJ: Mack, 1978).
3. Ahlstrom, “The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology,” CH 24 (1955) 257–72. For others see Hovenkamp, Science and Religion in America 1800–1860, 13, 14; and Mark Noll, The Princeton Theology 1812–1921: Scripture, Science, and Theological Method from Archibald Alexander to Benjamin Breckinridge (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1983) 30.
4. Mark Noll observes the persistence of the Princeton theology at Westminster Seminary and in such figures as John Gerstner and Roger Nicole in The Princeton Theology 1812–1921, 18.
5. Marsden, “J. Gresham Machen, History, and Truth,” WTJ 42 (1979–80) 157–75; and Wacker, “Augustus H. Strong; A Conservative Confrontation with History” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University, 1978) 10–13.
6. Ahlstrom, “The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology,” 268.
7. This is Marsden’s argument in “The Collapse of American Evangelical Academia” (forthcoming). He makes the similar point with specific reference to Machen in “J. Gresham Machen, History, and Truth,” 168–75.
8. Machen showed his awareness of the problems of the “common sense epistemology” in What is Faith? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1925) 26.
9. Machen, “Westminster Theological Seminary: Its Purpose and Plan,” in What is Christianity? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1951) 230.
10. Quoted in A. A. Hodge, Life of Charles Hodge (New York: Scribner’s, 1880) 521.
11. Francis L. Patton, “Princeton Seminary and the Faith,” in Centennial of Princeton Seminary (Princeton: At the Seminary, 1912) 349–50.
12. John W. Stewart, “The Princeton Theologians: The Tethered Theology” (uncompleted Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan) IV/7.
13. The Plan of the Theological Seminary (Philadelphia: Aitken, 1816) 11.
14. Ralph J. Danhof nonetheless detected “strains of Humanism” in Hodge’s theology (Charles Hodge as a Dogmatician [Goes, The Netherlands: Oosterbaan, 1929] 174).
15. This is not meant to imply that other schools of thought or seminaries held error or falsehood in high regard. I only mean that Princeton maintained a view of truth as objective, absolute, and invariable. This view persisted at Princeton even after the rise of Darwinism when truth was conceived of as in flux of as constantly changing.
16. Ahlstrom, “The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology,” 261.
17. Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science, 57.
18. See Hodge’s Systematic Theology (New York: Scribner’s, 1871; reprinted Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975) 1.212ff for the perils of Hume’s skepticism.
19. Ahlstrom, “The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology” 260.
20. Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (London: The Proprietors, 1818) 1–23.
21. Ibid., 213.
22. Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science, 55.
23. Hodge, Systematic Theology 1.9.
24. Ibid., 11.
25. Ibid., 1.
26. Bozeman (Protestants in an Age of Science, 155) calls Hodge’s method the most thoroughgoing endorsement of inductivism by the Old School.
27. Warfield, Selected Shorter Writings (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1968) 2.213.
28. This is Machen’s argument in “The Relation of Religion to Science and Philosophy,” Princeton Theological Review 24 (1926) 38–66, esp. p. 51.
29. Hodge, Systematic Theology 1.182.
30. Ibid., 10.
31. Machen, What is Faith? 241.
32. Although sometimes the two were inextricably bound as in the case of miracles. See Warfield, “The Question of Miracles,” Selected Shorter Writings 2.167–206.
33. Warfield, “Christianity the Truth,” Selected Shorter Writings 2.213.
34. Warfield, “Introduction to Beattie’s Apologetics,” Selected Shorter Writings 2.91.
35. Ibid., 96.
36. Warfield, “Apologetics,” Studies in Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932) 10.
37. Ibid.
38. Washington Gladden, Recollections (1909) 262–66, quoted in William R. Hutchison’s The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976) 77.
39. See James Ward Smith, “Religion and Science in American Philosophy,” The Shaping of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton University, 1961) 402–42 for an excellent essay on the accommodation of science.
40. See Lefferts A. Loetscher, The Broadening Church (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1957) 46–78 for examples in the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.
41. Hodge, Systematic Theology 3.78–79.
42. Machen, What is Faith? 47.
43. Ibid., 16-45.
44. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (New York: Macmillan, 1924) 20.
45. Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Philadelphia: E. H. Butler, 1871) 409.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Stewart, “The Princeton Theologians: The Tethered Theology” IV/34.
49. See Marsden, “J. Gresham Machen, History, and Truth,” for an excellent discussion of Princeton’s conception of history.
50. William Newton Clarke, Sixty Years with the Bible (New York: Scribner’s, 1910) 167–68.
51. Machen, “Life Founded Upon Truth,” in The Christian Faith in the Modern World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1947) 91–92.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid., 93-94.
55. Harry E. Fosdick, The Modern Use of the Bible (New York: Macmillan, 1925) 97–130.
56. Machen, What is Faith? 42.
57. See Machen, “The Virgin Birth of Christ,” in What is Christianity? 84-87, for the importance of the virgin birth as a test of orthodoxy.
58. Machen, “The Witness of the Gospels,” in What is Christianity? 51.
59. Warfield, “The Resurrection of Christ a Historical Fact,” Selected Shorter Writings 1.185.
60. Hodge appeals to the court of law to demonstrate the importance of human testimony in Systematic Theology 1.40.
61. Machen, “The Witness of the Gospels,” 53.
62. Hodge, “The Theology of the Intellect and that of the Feelings,” Essays and Reviews (New York: R. Carter & Brothers, 1857) 587.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid., 586.
65. Ibid., 585.
66. Ibid., 591-92.
67. Ibid., 597.
68. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 7.
69. Ibid., 18.
70. Ibid., 59.
71. Ibid., 18.
72. Ibid., 23.
73. Machen, What is Faith? 31.
74. Machen, “The Relation of Religion to Science and Philosophy,” 54.
75. See Ned Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1955) 113–29, for Machen’s personal struggle with the truth of Christianity.
76. See Machen, The Origin of Paul’s Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1921); and The Virgin Birth of Christ (New York: Harpers, 1930).
77. Machen, “The Relation of Religion to Science and Philosophy,” 50.
78. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 27.
79. Ibid., 121.
80. Ibid.
81. Machen however did not deprecate experience. See “History and Faith,” What is Christianity? 182.
82. Machen, What is Faith? 29.
83. One important fact was that of sin. See Christianity and Liberalism, 64-66.
84. Smith, “Religion and Science in American Philosophy,” 413–25.
85. See Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science, and Hovenkamp, Science and Religion in America 1800–1860.
86. Machen, “The Relation of Religion to Science and Philosophy,” 66.
87. Marsden, “The Collapse of American Evangelical Academia.”
88. Smith, “Religion and Science in American Philosophy,” 402–25.
89. Marsden, “The Collapse of American Evangelical Academia,” 68–69.
90. Marsden, “J. Gresham Machen, History, and Truth,” 168.
91. Ibid.
92. Marsden makes this point with reference to a comparison between Warfield and Abraham Kuyper in “The Collapse of American Evangelical Academia,” 53–63.
93. W. O. Carver, review of Christianity and Liberalism in RevExp 21 (1924) 345–46.
94. Ibid., 349.
95. Carver, review of The Modern Use of the Bible in RevExp 22 (1925) 254.
96. Machen, “The Modern Use of the Bible,” in What is Christianity? 264-66.
97. “I am assuming, indeed, that we believe in the reality of large spiritual truth discernible by powers divinely influenced” (W. N. Clarke, The Use of Scriptures in Theology [New York: Scribner’s, 1905] 74).
98. Ibid.
99. Although it does involve attending to the law of God and the perfection of Christ (What is Faith? 133).
100. Ibid., 134.
101. Machen, “The Relation of Religion to Science and Philosophy,” 61–62.
102. Machen, What is Faith? 136. In a most revealing statement, Machen shows a thorough recognition of the difference that perspective and point of view make on education, “A Christian boy or girl can learn mathematics, for example, from a teacher who is not a Christian; and truth is truth however learned. But while truth is truth however learned, the bearings of truth, the meaning of truth, the purpose of truth, even in the sphere of mathematics, seem entirely different to the Christian from that which they seem to the non-Christian; and that is why a truly Christian education is possible only when Christian conviction underlies not a part, but all, of the curriculum of the school” (“The Necessity of the Christian School,” in What is Christianity? 301).
103. Machen, What is Faith? 136.
104. Machen, “The Relation of Religion to Science and Philosophy,” 59.
105. “It is the very essence of Christianity that doctrine comes (logically though not temporally) before Christian experience” (ibid., 43).
106. Machen, “Life Founded Upon Truth,” 63.
107. Green, review of E. Y. Mullins, Why is Christianity True? in Princeton Theological Review 4 (1906) 402.
108. Marsden makes this similar point about Machen in “J. Gresham Machen, History, and Truth,” 174–75, and about Warfield in “The Collapse of American Evangelical Academia,” 63–68.
109. Machen, “History and Faith,” 183.
110. Machen, “What is Christianity?” in What is Christianity? 18.
111. Smith, “Religion and Science in American Philosophy,” 430.
112. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism, 258.